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Dialect Matters : respecting vernacular language : Columns from the Eastern Daily Press
\"Based on Peter Trudgill's weekly column in the Eastern Daily Press newspaper, this book has two overall messages. The first is that language is a fascinating and enjoyable phenomenon which not enough people know enough about. The second is that we should not discriminate negatively against individuals and groups because of their accent, dialect or native language. Linguistic prejudice, known as 'linguicism', is more publicly and shamelessly demonstrated than racism and sexism, as is 'prescriptivism', the practice of elevating one language or language variety as 'better' than another. Written in an entertaining and accessible style, Trudgill's columns support the language of ordinary people and explore topics such as nonstandard versus standard dialects; vernacular (everyday) language as opposed to politically correct language; informal vocabulary as opposed to business-school jargon; and minority versus majority languages. Each article is also accompanied by notes designed for students and those unfamiliar with the East Anglian setting\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Perceptions, Attitudes, and Choosing to Study Foreign Languages in England: An Experimental Intervention
The declining interest in foreign languages in English-speaking countries has been attributed to negative societal attitudes and specific pupil attitudes and perceptions. While various initiatives have aimed to encourage language study, little research has systematically documented the relationship among perceptions, attitudes, and actually opting to study a language (henceforth, uptake). This article reports on an experiment involving 604 13/14-year-old pupils in 3 secondary schools in England that tested whether perceived relevance of languages can be improved through 2 different interventions (a panel discussion with external speakers versus a lesson with an external tutor) and whether pupil perceptions and attitudes can be linked explicitly to foreign language uptake at an optional level. Findings show that only pupils who participated in the panel discussion subsequently reported more positive attitudes and higher personal relevance of languages, though participating in either intervention may have contributed to higher uptake compared to a nonactive control group. Boys appeared to have generally more negative attitudes toward both language learning and advocacy than girls. Declared intentions to study or drop a language did not align with final decisions for one quarter of the pupils. Critically, perceptions of language lessons (French, German, or Spanish) and attitudes to languages were reliable predictors of uptake, though the strongest predictor was whether pupils considered languages to be important for themselves. Perceived wider importance of languages was not, in itself, a sufficient incentive. (Verlag).
Journal Article
Grammar tests, de facto policy and pedagogical coercion in England’s primary schools
Since their introduction by the Conservative government in 2013, primary school children in England have taken a mandated grammar, punctuation and spelling assessment, which places an emphasis on decontextualised, standardised English and the identification of traditional grammatical terminology. Despite some concise criticisms from educational linguists, there remains no detailed and critical investigation into the nature of the tests, their effects on test takers, and the policy initiatives which led up to their implementation. This article contributes to this gap in knowledge, using critical language testing as a methodological framework, and drawing on a bricolage of data sources such as political speeches, policy documents, test questions and interviews with teachers. I discuss how the tests work as de facto language policy, implemented as one arm of the government’s ‘core-knowledge’ educational agenda, underpinned by a reductive conceptualisation of language and a problematic discourse of ‘right/wrong’ ways of speaking. I reveal how teachers talk about the ‘power’ of the tests, intimidating and coercing them into pedagogies they do not necessarily believe in or value, which ultimately position them as vehicles for the government’s conservative and prescriptive language ideologies.
Journal Article
Language-Specific Developmental Differences in Speech Production: A Cross-Language Acoustic Study
Speech productions of 40 English- and 40 Japanese-speaking children (aged 2-5) were examined and compared with the speech produced by 20 adult speakers (10 speakers per language). Participants were recorded while repeating words that began with \"s\" and \"sh\" sounds. Clear language-specific patterns in adults' speech were found, with English speakers differentiating \"s\" and \"sh\" in 1 acoustic dimension (i.e., spectral mean) and Japanese speakers differentiating the 2 categories in 3 acoustic dimensions (i.e., spectral mean, standard deviation, and onset F2 frequency). For both language groups, children's speech exhibited a gradual change from an early undifferentiated form to later differentiated categories. The separation processes, however, only occur in those acoustic dimensions used by adults in the corresponding languages.
Journal Article
Changes in English Past Tense Use by Bilingual School-Age Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine changes in English past tense accuracy and errors among Spanish-English bilingual children with typical development (TD) and developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Thirty-three children were tested before and after 1 year to examine changes in clinically relevant English past tense errors using an elicited production task. A mixed-model linear regression using age as a continuous variable revealed a robust effect for age. A 4-way repeated-measures analysis of variance was conducted with age (young, old) and language ability group (TD, DLD) as between-subjects variables, time (Time 1, Time 2) and verb type (regular, irregular, and novel verbs) as within-subject variables, and percent accuracy as the dependent variable. Subsequently, a 4-way repeated-measures analysis of variance was conducted to measure the overall distribution of verb errors across 2 time points. Results: Overall, children produced regular and novel verb past tense forms with higher accuracy than irregular past tense verbs in an elicitation task. Children with TD were more accurate than children with DLD. Younger children made more improvement than older children from Time 1 to Time 2, especially in the regular and novel verb conditions. Bare stem and overregularization were the most common errors across all groups. Errors consisting of stem + ing were more common in children with DLD than those with TD in the novel verb condition. Discussion: Contrary to an earlier report (Jacobson & Schwartz, 2005), the relative greater difficulty with regular and novel verbs was replaced by greater difficulty for irregular past tense, a pattern consistent with monolingual impairment. Age was a contributing factor, particularly for younger children with DLD who produced more stem + ing errors in the novel verb condition. For all children, and particularly for those with DLD, an extended period for irregular past tense learning was evident. The results support a usage-based theory of language acquisition and impairment.
Journal Article
Performativity, Commodification and Commitment: An I-Spy Guide to the Neoliberal University
The author was a student in two \"plate glass\", welfare state universities, Essex (founded 1964) and Sussex (founded 1961), although they were very different. Essex was very small, socially very diverse and politically \"exciting\", to say the least--a sort of comprehensive university. His sociology teachers there profoundly influenced him intellectually and they taught him to think. Sussex, \"Balliol by the Sea\" as it was dubbed, had a very different social profile and institutional habitus but was pedagogically very adventurous. The author's aim as a researcher and a teacher became to provide tools for others to think with. He was produced and formed as a welfare state academic subject in these contexts. Over the past 20 years, he has been re-formed as a neoliberal academic subject. In this personal reflection, the author examines the growth of the neoliberal university during his lifetime and laments the commodification of academic practice and the commercial ethos of much of the higher education system. (Contains 2 notes.)
Journal Article
Navigating the vernacular across the lifespan: a panel study of the phonetic realisation of the first-person singular possessive
This article explores intraspeaker malleability in the realisation of the first-person possessive in the North-East of England ([maɪ], versus [mi] and [ma]). The analysis relies on a combination of a trend sample and a novel dynamic panel corpus that covers the entire adult lifespan. While [mi] has been around at least since the 1970s on Tyneside, [ma] appears to have made its way into the system during the 1980s and 1990s. The panel data add intraspeaker information to this ongoing change, revealing a turnover in the proportional usage of possessive variants between two recordings that are on average ten years apart. Regression modelling provides differentiated information about intraspeaker changes across the lifespan, suggesting that, with only a few exceptions, intraspeaker grammars are stable across the lifespan. The analysis supports recent panel research that has argued for the importance of considering the socio-demographic trajectory of the individual: while speakers who are part of the ‘ marché scolaire ’ (Bourdieu & Boltanski 1975: 7) orient towards the standard, speakers working as professional carers (e.g. nurses) tend to retain high rates of the reduced variants across their lifespans to do local identity work and establish better interpersonal relations with their clients.
Journal Article
u/-FRONTING AND AGENT-BASED MODELING: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF SOUND CHANGE
This study is concerned with whether an asymmetric phonetic overlap between speaker groups contributes to the directional spread of sound change. An acoustic analysis of speakers of Southern British English showed that younger speakers' fronted /u/ was probabilistically closer to that of older speakers' retracted /u/ distributions than the other way around. Agent-based modeling based on the same data showed an asymmetric shift of older toward younger speakers' fronted /u/. The general conclusion is that sound change is likely to be propagated when a phonetic bias within an individual is further magnified by a difference between speaker groups that is in the same direction.
Journal Article
Symposium: Language Assessment in Standards-Based Education Reform
This symposium article, to which three authors contribute distinct parts, presents the rationale for standards-based language assessment and examines both the uses and misuses of language assessments in English-speaking countries that are engaged in standards-based education reform. Specifically, they focus on the assessment of emergent bilinguals (also referred to as English language learners or English as an additional language students). The first part lays out the intentions and challenges of standards-based language assessment for emergent bilinguals, focusing on validity concerns. The second part describes classroom-based teacher-led assessments of emergent bilinguals in England, which carry high stakes along with the national standardized tests. This contrasts with what is happening in the United States where, as the third part describes, the main focus is on high-stakes standardized testing for purposes of accountability. In addition to the challenges inherent in attempts to measure language in meaningful ways, a thread cutting across the authors' accounts is the widespread practice of high-stakes standardized testing. The U.S. and English cases show how issues of validity arise when emergent bilinguals are simply included into assessments intended for English monolinguals without appropriate differentiation, and when an assessment is used for purposes beyond what it was designed to do. As all of the authors of this symposium article contend, assessments—particularly when standardized—hold the potential to dominate standards-based education reform efforts when they are ultimately summative and attached to severe consequences.
Journal Article
The Transmission of \Beowulf\
The Transmission of \"Beowulf\"
like
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
, is a foundational work of Western literature that
originated in mysterious circumstances. In
The Transmission of Beowulf , Leonard Neidorf addresses
philological questions that are fundamental to the study of the
poem. Is
Beowulf the product of unitary or composite
authorship? How substantially did scribes alter the text during
its transmission, and how much time elapsed between composition
and preservation?
Neidorf answers these questions by distinguishing linguistic
and metrical regularities, which originate with the
Beowulf poet, from patterns of textual corruption,
which descend from copyists involved in the poem's
transmission. He argues, on the basis of archaic features that
pervade
Beowulf and set it apart from other Old English poems,
that the text preserved in the sole extant manuscript (ca.
1000) is essentially the work of one poet who composed it circa
700. Of course, during the poem's written transmission, several
hundred scribal errors crept into its text. These errors are
interpreted in the central chapters of the book as valuable
evidence for language history, cultural change, and scribal
practice. Neidorf's analysis reveals that the scribes earnestly
attempted to standardize and modernize the text's orthography,
but their unfamiliarity with obsolete words and ancient heroes
resulted in frequent errors. The
Beowulf manuscript thus emerges from his study as an
indispensible witness to processes of linguistic and cultural
change that took place in England between the eighth and
eleventh centuries. An appendix addresses
J. R. R. Tolkien's Beowulf: A Translation and
Commentary , which was published in 2014. Neidorf assesses
Tolkien's general views on the transmission of Beowulf and
evaluates his position on various textual issues.
eBook